[Ns-developers] ns-3.5-rc3

[Mathieu Lacage]

hi,

Thanks to the efforts of many bug reporters and bug fixers, we finally
reached rc3-state for ns-3.5. I expect the tarball below to become
ns-3.5 on friday without code modifications so, everyone, if you have a
couple of spare cycles, please, download, test, and report bugs on
http://www.nsnam.org/bugzilla

The biggest missing piece in this tarball compared to our final release
is documentation: we still need to review and update the documentation
to match the current codebase.

the release:
http://www.nsnam.org/releases/ns-allinone-3.5-rc3.tar.bz2

tentative release notes:

Supported platforms
-------------------
ns-3.4 has been tested on the following platforms:
  - linux x86 gcc 4.2, 4.1, and, 3.4.6.
  - linux x86_64 gcc 4.4.0, 4.3.2, 4.2.3, 4.2.1, 4.1.3, 3.4.6
  - MacOS X ppc and x86 (gcc 4.0.x and 4.2.x)
  - cygwin gcc 3.4.4 (debug only), gcc 4.3.2 (debug and optimized)
  - mingw gcc 3.4.5 (debug only)

Not all ns-3 options are available on all platforms; consult the
wiki for more information:
http://www.nsnam.org/wiki/index.php/Installation

New user-visible features
-------------------------

  a) 802.11 MAC:
     - EDCA multi-qos-class support (Mirko Banchi)
     - 802.11n initial support for A-MSDU frame aggregation (Mirko Banchi)
     - aarf-cd and cara rate control algorithms (Federico Maguolo)
  b) 802.11 PHY:
     - 802.11b PHY support (Gary Pei)
     - Nakagami propagation loss model (Timo Bingmann)
     - radiotap and prism headers for PCAP output (Nicola Baldo)
  c) RandomVariable:
     - GammaVariable and ErlangVariable (Timo Bingmann)
     - ZipfVariable (Francesco Malandrino)
  d) UdpEcho: allows setting the payload of echo packets
  e) Ipv4/Ipv4RoutingProtocol: allow fine-grained control over
     routing policy and arbitrary composition of routing protocols

API changes from ns-3.4
-----------------------
API changes for this release are documented in the file CHANGES.html.  The
internal API and composition of the IPv4 stack underwent significant
refactoring in this release cycle.

Known issues
------------
ns-3 build is known to fail on the following platforms:
  - gcc 3.3 and earlier
  - optimized builds on gcc 3.4.4 and 3.4.5
  - optimized builds on linux x86 gcc 4.0.x

Future releases
---------------
Our next release, which is expected to happen in 2 to 4 months from now, will
feature the merging of some of our projects currently in development including
fuller IPv6 support, and some smaller features such as a new Global ARP package 
and possibly a new Testing and Validation suite.